Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Due to a virus, I wiped and reinstalled XP Home SP2 on a six-year-old Dell laptop. But I couldn't run Windows upgrades -- it kept trying to run Windows Genuine Advantage but never getting through the whole process to display the pass/fail result. I have a feeling it's perhaps because Microsoft support for XP SP2 ended July 13, 2010 (same date as Windows 2000!). By manually downloading and installing the SP3 service pack, I was able to finally get through Windows Update and WGA.

I finally found something XP can't do -- handle a 4TB USB hard drive. I use those to back up a file server, and I had to upgrade the computer that performs those backups from XP to Vista (cheaper than W7) in order to recognize the 4TB USB hard drive.